The present invention relates to an auto-play apparatus and, more particularly, to an auto-play apparatus having a function for editing multi-level or continuous-amount music tone control information contained in auto-play data by thinning out this data.
Conventionally, an auto-play apparatus is known. The auto-play apparatus is arranged integrally with or independently of an electronic musical instrument such as an electronic keyboard, electronic piano, or the like. It effects an auto-play on the basis of auto-play data stored in an internal storage device such as a RAM (Random Access Memory) or the like.
In general, auto-play data for automatically playing a certain music piece is made up of 16 parts of auto-play data, Part1 to Part16, including a rhythm part, chord part, melody part, and the like, as shown in, e.g., FIG. 19.
The auto-play data Part1 to Part16 include various kinds of information such as note data containing key numbers, velocity information, and the like used for playing the individual parts, tone color data containing tone color numbers and the like, volume data containing volume values, and the like, music tone control information, and the like.
The music tone control information is normally multi-level or continuous-amount information such as after touch information, pitch bend information, modulation information, volume information, panpot information, expression pedal information, and the like.
Since such multi-level or continuous-amount information includes a very large number of data, this results in a large total volume of auto-play data.
For example, the pitch bend information is generated upon operation of a dial or wheel-like operation member so as to change the pitch of a music piece. Since the information generated by each operation is an analog value, data are generated at very short intervals.
However, the above-mentioned multi-level or continuous-amount music tone control information sometimes has nearly no influence on actual auto-play as long as it has data at certain intervals.
For this reason, in order to reduce the volume of the auto-play data, an auto-play apparatus which edits multi-level or continuous-amount music tone control information by thinning out its data (thinning-out edit function) is known.
However, since the conventional auto-play apparatus with the thinning-out edit function uses a method of thinning out data alternately one by one or a method of leaving only maximum and minimum value data, an auto-play that the user intended cannot be generated.
More specifically, when music tone control information A consisting of data a1 to a10 (FIG. 20) is present in auto-play data, and is edited by thinning out its data, the conventional auto-play apparatus thins out data alternately one by one, and leaves data a1, a3, a5, a7, and a9 of the data a1 to a10 as the music tone control information A. Alternatively, the apparatus leaves, as the music tone control information A, only data a10 corresponding to a maximum value and data a1 corresponding to a minimum value of the data a1 to a10.
As a result, when data are simply thinned out alternately one by one, the data a10 corresponding to the maximum value of the data a1 to a10 may be thinned out. When only the maximum and minimum value data are left, changes between the data a1 and a10 are ignored.
As described above, since the conventional auto-play apparatus with the thinning-out edit function may thin out the maximum or minimum value of multi-level or continuous-amount music tone control information, or ignores changes between the maximum and minimum values, an auto-play that the user intended cannot be generated.